Turn it off, turn it on again
Ministers’ cluelessness on tech is leaving us all vulnerable to attack
Hannah Jane Parkinson
Glitch in the system: Amber Rudd has struggled to grasp the language of tech
© PHOTO BY LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES, OZAN KOSE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
To err is human, but to really screw up requires a computer— ideally with a politician behind it. Take Amber Rudd, Home Secretary and one of the few adults in the cabinet. Rudd is competent enough, but get her on tech and word-origami happens. I really worry about her. I worry that she is going to embarrass herself in a high-level meeting with GCHQ by asking whether we can physically break encryption by “like, hitting phones with a hammer?”
Encryption is important because it keeps us all safe. There are many arguments against weakening it—the ethical argument of our right to privacy, for instance—but there are also plenty of security angles: if we allow backdoors into encryption, it will make us vulnerable to criminals, thieves, spies, voyeurs. Sabotaging cryptography would be absurd, it’s our best line of defence, and once it’s broken it can’t simply be unbroken. To improve our targeting of the bad guys we should be becoming more efficient with the tools we do have; deciphering, for instance, call records and email time stamps.